Organizations that offer products and/or services associated with customer accounts have traditionally relied on in-person servicing at a brick-and-mortar location, call centers, IVR systems to interact with customers for account servicing.
In person servicing at a brick-and-mortar location and call centers staffed with human representatives can provide certain advantages, particularly for customers who wish to speak to a human. However, such staffing can be cost-prohibitive on the organization (and, in turn, the customers) and often results in long wait times for customers.
To reduce cost and increase account servicing efficiency, many organizations employ IVR systems. Such systems can provide customers with requested information and perform routine account actions without having to maintain a large workforce of human customer service agents. While cost effective, existing computerized customer interaction systems tend to provide an impersonal and robotic user experience, limited by scripted questions and responses, and can require a cumbersome authorization process for each customer-service session.
Regardless of whether an organization employs in-person servicing, call centers, or IVR systems, these approaches utilize voice-based communication that can often be disadvantageous for the customer. Spoken information can be easily misunderstood, difficult to follow or remember, difficult to hear (e.g., due to hearing impairments or background noise), and does not have a persistent record for the customer. In addition, a customer may be in an environment or situation (e.g., in a public place or in a meeting) where it would be inconvenient or impractical to converse with an IVR model or a human representative in voice-based communication over the phone.
As an alternative to voice-based communication systems, some organizations have turned to text-based communication to interact with customers via their mobile phones. Text-based communication systems makes it easy and efficient to store a record of an entire customer service interaction and can convey detailed information to a customer that is easier to receive visually than by voice (e.g., a long account number, a recent transaction history, balances in multiple accounts, etc.). Text-based communication systems are typically less likely to be misunderstood and easy to remember because they provide a persistent record for the customer. However, text-based communication systems have more difficulty addressing certain types of customer requests than voice-based communication system due to the nature of those requests and information in the related responses. Additionally, customers are typically at the mercy of which type of communication system that the organization has chosen to employ, and cannot select a communication medium that is more convenient for himself or herself. Even for organizations that provide multiple types of communication mediums (e.g., a call center, an in-person brick-and-mortar location, and a text-based communication system) to their customers, such comprehensive “systems” operate as separate systems that cannot seamlessly transition a customer between communication mediums. For example, a customer who texts into a text-based communication system may have to authenticate himself and submit his request only to find out that he must submit that type of request to the organization's IVR system, requiring the customer to call the IVR system and both authenticate himself and submit his request to that particular system. This inability to transition a customer service interaction between communication mediums is not only time-consuming and irritating for the customer, but inefficiently overuses the organization's resources as the text-based communication and IVR systems pass customer service interactions between one another and repeat completed steps.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved systems to provide efficient and cost-effective customer interaction systems for account servicing. Embodiments of the present disclosure are directed to this and other considerations.